History 111 Assessment
This assessment will ask you to do several things:
Part 1: Primary Source Assessment
A. Read a set of primary source documents related to one historical period
B. Draft a thesis based on the set of primary source documents
C. Identify the era represented by the set of primary source documents
Part 2: Secondary Source Assessment
D. Interpret the thesis of the secondary source excerpt
E. Relate the set of primary sources and the secondary source in terms of cause
and/or effect
Part 1: Primary Source Assessment
A. Read the attached set of primary source documents.
B. Draft a thesis based on the set of primary source documents
A thesis is a statement that you would prove in a paper. It should have a point of view, stating a viewpoint that would be supported by the documents you have read. It should only be a sentence or two.
Draft your thesis here:
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C. Identify the era represented by the set of primary source documents
During what timeframe do you think the events described in the sources occurred?
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Part 2: Secondary Source Assessment
D. Interpret the thesis of the secondary source
Read the attached secondary source excerpt. In one sentence, what appears to be the author's thesis?
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E. Relate the set of primary sources and the secondary source in terms of cause and/or effect
What causes or effects are implied when you consider both the primary source documents and the secondary source excerpt?
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History 111 Assessment: Set of Primary Source Documents
Source #1
Three stories of a ten-floor building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place were burned yesterday, and while the fire was going on 141 young men and women at least 125 of them mere girls were burned to death or killed by jumping to the pavement below.
The building was fireproof. It shows now hardly any signs of the disaster that overtook it. The walls are as good as ever so are the floors, nothing is the worse for the fire except the furniture and 141 of the 600 men and girls that were employed in its upper three stories.
Most of the victims were suffocated or burned to death within the building, but some who fought their way to the windows and leaped met death as surely, but perhaps more quickly, on the pavements below.
All Over in Half an Hour.
Nothing like it has been seen in New York since the burning of the General Slocum. The fire was practically all over in half an hour. It was confined to three floors the eighth, ninth, and tenth of the building. But it was the most murderous fire that New York had seen in many years.
The victims who are now lying at the Morgue waiting for some one to identify them by a tooth or the remains of a burned shoe were mostly girls from 16 to 23 years of age. They were employed at making shirtwaist by the Triangle Waist Company, the principal owners of which are Isaac Harris and Max Blanck. Most of them could barely speak English. Many of them came from Brooklyn. Almost all were the main support of their hard-working families.
There is just one fire escape in the building. That one is an interior fire escape. In Greene Street, where the terrified unfortunates crowded before they began to make their mad leaps to death, the whole big front of the building is guiltless of one. Nor is there a fire escape in the back. . . .
Source #2
I was walking through Washington Square when a puff of smoke issuing from the factory building caught my eye. I reached the building before the alarm was turned in. I saw every feature of the tragedy visible from outside the building. I learned a new sound--a more horrible sound than description can picture. It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk.
Thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead, thud—dead. Sixty-two thud—deads. I call them that, because the sound and the thought of death came to me each time, at the same instant. There was plenty of chance to watch them as they came down. The height was eighty feet.
The first ten thud—deads shocked me. I looked up—saw that there were scores of girls at the windows. The flames from the floor below were beating in their faces. Somehow I knew that they, too, must come down, and something within me—something that I didn't know was there—steeled me.
I even watched one girl falling. Waving her arms, trying to keep her body upright until the very instant she struck the sidewalk, she was trying to balance herself. Then came the thud--then a silent, unmoving pile of clothing and twisted, broken limbs.
As I reached the scene of the fire, a cloud of smoke hung over the building. . . . I looked up to the seventh floor. There was a living picture in each window—four screaming heads of girls waving their arms. . . .
On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wires to the wrists of the dead girls, numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring. A fireman who came downstairs from the building told me that there were at least fifty bodies in the big room on the seventh floor. Another fireman told me that more girls had jumped down an air shaft in the rear of the building. I went back there, into the narrow court, and saw a heap of dead girls. . . .
The floods of water from the firemen's hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.
Source #3
Source #4
Source #5
On xxx, a fire occurred in the shirtwaist factory of Harris & Blanck, at Washington Place and Greene Street. One hundred and forty six girls and men were killed in the fire, and many others were injured. Some of these were members of the Waistmakers’ Union, some of them had been members, and all were workers in a trade that the Ladies’ Waist and Dressmakers’ Union was especially organized to protect and represent. This was the factory where the shirtwaist strike of 1909 broke out, the strikers being out five months. While the strike was lost and the factory was not under the control of the Union at the time of the fire, the whole matter deeply concerned the Union, and it was natural that they should take steps at once in relief of the distress involved.
The fire occurred Saturday afternoon about five o’clock; and Sunday morning a corps of Women’s Trade Union League members was visiting the families of the sufferers in the name of the Ladies’ Waist and Dressmakers’ Union, Local No. 25. They reported the families where immediate relief was needed, and the Union at once began to give out emergent relief. . . .
Source #6
The following bills recommended by the Commission in its preliminary report were passed by the Legislature during the session of 1912, and became laws:
1. Registration of factories.
2. Physical examination of children before employment certificate is issued.
3. Fire drills.
4. Automatic sprinklers.
5. Fire prevention; removal of rubbish; fire-proof receptacles for waste material; protection of gas jets; prohibition of smoking in factories.
6. Prohibition of the eating of lunch in rooms where poisonous substances are prepared or generated in the process of manufacture; adequate hot and cold washing facilities for such establishments.
7. Employment prohibited of women within four weeks after child-birth.
8. Summary power of Commissioner of Labor over unclean and unsanitary factories.
Source #7
1. Reorganization of Labor Department; Industrial Board.
2. Penalties for violation of Labor Law and Industrial Code.
3, Fire-proof receptacles; gas jets; smoking.
4, Fire alarm signal system and fire drills.
5. Fire escapes and exits; limitation of number of occupants; construction of future factory buildings.
6. Amendment to Greater New York charter with reference to the Fire Prevention Law. . . .
History 111 Assessment: Secondary Source Excerpt
THE OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION
A History of its First Thirteen Years, 1971-1984
By Judson MacLaury
The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 heralded a new era in the history of public efforts to protect workers from harm on the job. This Act established for the first time a nationwide, federal program to protect almost the entire work force from job-related death, injury and illness. Secretary of Labor James Hodgson, who had helped shape the law, termed it "the most significant legislative achievement" for workers in a decade. Hodgson's first step was to establish within the Labor Department, effective April 28, 1971, a special agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to administer the Act. Building on the Bureau of Labor Standards as a nucleus, the new agency took on the difficult task of creating from scratch a program that would meet the legislative intent of the Act.